eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

01/16/2010

"In here is the dream"

I hesitate to say anything that
everything that needs to be said about has been. One has to take their hats off
to the people who worked to tell this story regardless of what you think about
the story. Like Orson Scott Card’s Maker series,
it retells the story of Imperialism as though the world views of the natives
had been actually the way the world worked. It is a world where prayer to the “Great
Spirit” is answered, where all things in nature really are connected, and where
faith and spirituality plus bravery beats technology plus avarice (In the case
of American imperialism in the American West, this was not so.) This was the
paradox of this movie for me. By means of better weapons and an aggressive ideology,
America took over land and resources that it has used to support the world’s
most expensive entertainment industry. With that industry, we tell perhaps the
best story ever made about how the Native Americans had a better set of ideas
and should have won. This is the great irony. It is impossible not to celebrate
a movie where greed and avarice combined with weapons and brutality are not
able to overcome natives holding hands in a circle around the “Tree of Souls”.
But all of those people in the theater did not leave the theater and hop on
horses or Pterodactyls. They got in their SUV’s, Minivans, and Caravans, and
drove home under the power of “unobtainium” (The natural resource that serves
as the cause of the movie’s corporate run military industrial complex’s desire
to relocate these Na’vi “Cherokees”).

I for one cannot but applaud a movie
that speaks critically of an avaricious military run on an ethic of profit
motive. Huzzah for that part of the theme. Whether or not this means that I
support the advocacy of a pantheistic return to pagan forms of earth worship
may be another matter. The interesting thing about the creation of a 3-D CGI
world where a director can make their philosophy or religion of choice actually
function as it is believed to without evidence, is that directors of any or all
religious or philosophical positions can soon have us “experiencing” in 3-D
their respective philosophies, unencumbered by the need to give real world
evidence.

"Everything
is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the
dream."

The Na’vi have little USB cables in
their pony tails that allow them to wire themselves into the tree of souls, to
plants, or to animals. This is no metaphor in a movie that lets you “see” it
happening. Assertion (all life is connected” has become incarnate. Or would the
proper term be “infilmate” … which as you know, is not the same thing.)

Question for Comment: Have you ever
actually experienced a sense of connectedness in the world?